Design and implementation of a hierarchical control system architecture for a modular pulsed power supply system

High power electronics converters, recently, have been composed of modular building blocks, Power Electronics Building Blocks (PEBB), to gain advantage for modularity, scalability, power density, and reliability. In addition to their hardware configuration, the control system of those converters should also be modular for scalability. In this paper, a hierarchical control system architecture together with both communication and protection means is proposed for a modular Pulsed Power Supply (PPS) for the implementation of Electromagnetic Launcher (EML) system. An isolated interface between high voltage control system elements on each PPS module and main control system is recommended and implemented for the EML system. The proposed control system architecture is formed via modular PXI based control hardware of National Instruments. The proposed hierarchical control system architecture is an industry application of the control system architecture suggested in IEEE Standard (Std 1676-2010) to the PEBB based modular PPS with some application specific contributions of authors to the subject.